As I mentioned recently, as hard as it is to believe, this blog is rapidly approaching the end of its fifth year of existence. Our first post was delivered to the anxiously waiting world on January 1, 2008; so thus upcoming January 1 will represent our fifth anniversary. In the blogging world, that’s almost the equivalent of a fiftieth anniversary, given how fast most blogs turn over. Something that is even more satisfying than mere longevity is that we really have found a niche in the medical blogosphere to the point where we’ve become quite influential. People notice us. Our targets notice it when we discuss them. Sometimes even the press notices us. This is all a very good thing.

Unfortunately, even though we’ve been at this for just shy of five years, there are still topics we haven’t covered, or at least haven’t covered in sufficient depth. The topic of my post today is one of the latter topics. We’ve mentioned it before; we’ve alluded to it before (for instance when discussing the antivaccine website Medical Voices and the Ayn Rand-worshiping Association of American Physicians and Surgeons; but there hasn’t been a post dedicated to this particular topic. I find this particularly odd because it was one a piece of misinformation promoted by elements of the antivaccine movement that truly shocked and disgusted me. Before I learned of this particular myth, I was surprised to learn that there are really people who think that vaccines are dangerous and cause autism, but I viewed it as being of a piece of a lot of other quackery I was discovering at the time.

Way back in the day, when I first encountered antivaccine views in that wretched Usenet swamp of pseudoscience, antiscience, and quackery known as misc.health.alternative (m.h.a.), there was one particular antivaccine lie that disturbed me more than just about any other. As I mentioned, it wasn’t the claim that vaccines cause autism, which is more or less the central dogma of the antivaccine movement. Even ten years ago, before the series of studies that have been released since then that fail to find a hint of a whiff of causation between vaccines and autism, that wasn’t a particularly difficult myth to refute. Indeed, given newer studies, refuting that myth has only gotten easier over the years. Emblematic of how far into the depths that particular myth has been pummeled, I know it’s gotten pretty easy when even the mainstream media start to accept that the claim that vaccines cause autism is a myth and report matter-of-factly on issues such as Andrew Wakefield’s fraud and don’t give nearly as much copious and prominent media time to the likes of Jenny McCarthy. Let’s just put it this way. When the hosts of a “morning zoo”-type radio show in Salt Lake City pummel the latest antivaccine celebrity to make a fool of himself, Rob Schneider, you know that, from an informational standpoint at least, the tide appears to have turned from several years ago, when the media took this myth a lot more seriously. That’s not to say that we don’t still have a problem. After all, “philosophical” exemption rates are going up based on a lot of this sort of misinformation, but at least the media are less insistent on “telling both sides” of a science story that doesn’t really have two sides.(more…)